Remnants in smouldered ashes

Chapter 13

In the events that followed, Akane was made known that SEAUn had begun their first formal elections in Shamballa Float. Sybil's puppet Kasei wryly smiled as she made mention of the news on a whim. What matters to the senior inspector was the need for democracy when it came down to maintaining balance within society. If the people chose Chairman Han over other candidates, despite her spite towards Sybil, what Akane wanted was for the people to be heard. And so if Chairman Han were to win by the means of the people, she would value that decision, but would be saddened by the outcome.

Her fight against Sybil, and her fight against crime, she was facing an internal war against two fronts. Each time she raised the Dominator to someone's head, she questioned the value in them rather than the crimes they were about to do. Each time she does so, she was more than willing to have a Dominator pointed at herself rather than those whose psycho passes were clouded. A challenge that she posed on herself of the value in her existence.

Am I... even human?

Over the time she spent working in the CID, the ideals and values she tried so hard to maintain had begun put herself into question. She knew that when the day would come when Sybil's value would be tested against the views of the thousands that they ruled over, her loyalty to the spirit of justice would force her to stand on a platform to be judged like the rest of them.

"When the time comes, I'll go to hell with you," she had once said to Kasei.

The weight of her sin after Kamui's death was something she couldn't forgive. He had the means of changing society. But all she did was erasing him from existence. Although she couldn't forgive his methods, she knew the value he had was worth more than the value that Sybil had seen in her.

Even after her clear emotional antipathy towards the system, not once were they able to judge her. Just how far would she have to go in order to color her hue black? In thoughts like these, she understood where people like Kamui and Makishima were coming from. But she never wanted to choose the same path as them. Not when it demanded the lives of others.

"I highly doubt that it's the matter of how you were able to keep a clear hue," Ginoza once said to her. "I think it's the matter of why. Dad... he said that the reason why he became an enforcer was because he couldn't accept the society that judges criminals at gunpoint. He said to me that accepting the circumstances was possibly one factor to keeping a clear hue."

She highly doubted that were the case. If she had the choice, she wouldn't mind revealing to her new confidant that the society they were living in was made up of criminally asymptomatic brains that wreaked havoc in the past 23 years. But after Kagari's death, she could only do so much as to keep much of it to herself.

Three years and a few months after Kougami left made her aware of the stakes that her job entails. And with her position as senior inspector of Division 1 along with the envious gazes from other inspectors including her own kohai, she felt that she was placed onto a pedestal for others to see and never touch. Aware of her own authority and the responsibilities that came with it, at times it scared herself at the thought of abusing it for her own means.

Meeting Kougami again allowed her to step down from that pedestal and become nothing more than an equal to him. To the enforcers under her belt, she was given the highest regard. To Shimotsuki, she was seen as the chief's 'favorite'. To Kougami, she was just Tsunemori Akane. The value in those words gave her the confidence to become the best in what she could be. Somewhere down the line in her rookie days, she placed him on a pedestal within the time they spent together as an inspector and enforcer.

And yet, when he left, a sense of betrayal was felt as the brilliant detective Kougami abandoned everything in order to seek justice by means of breaking the law. Although the years made her aware that it was an inevitable fate, a tug in her heart made her mourn for that loss. An outcry of a sense of abandonment and loss of someone whom she had been dependent of.